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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Our study criticizes the respective theodicies and methodologies of Joseph Washington, James Cone, and Albert Cleage. Our argument is reducible to the following propositions. (1) On the basis of their own presuppositions, the point of departure for black theology must be the question: Is God a white racist? (2) Accordingly, a viable theodicy, one which refutes the charge of divine racism, must be the foundation for the edifice of black theology. (3) The theodicies of the above theologians leave the issue of God's racism essentially unresolved. Consequently, the remainder of the theological system lacks adequate support.
1 After Auschwitz (Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1966)Google Scholar.
2 “Since we experience reality as history and no longer as cosmos, the fundamental theodicy question is still with us and is more pressing than before. For us it has no longer only its old naturalistic form, as in the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755. It appears today in a political form, as in the question of Auschwitz… We ask the question: An Deus sit? (‘Whether God is?’) on grounds of history and its crimes…” Religion, Revolution and the Future (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), 205Google Scholar.
3 Davidson, Basil estimates that slavery, “before and after embarkation,” cost Africa fifty million blacks. Black Mother (Atlantic-Little, Brown Co., 1961), 80Google Scholar.
4 A Black Theology of Liberation (Lippincott, 1970), 115Google Scholar.
5 It is not our intent to establish deductive requirements for a viable theodicy. We contend that the issue of divine racism emerges from the events and crimes of history. The answer, likewise, must appeal to historical data and not a mere rational or theoretical formulation unsubstantiated by the actual history of blacks. It will become clear that the presuppositions of the black theologians — the politics of God, the priority of the black experience, etc. — dictate that the actual black experience, past, present, or future, must be the arena for debate, and not abstract possibilities.
6 The Politics of God (Beacon, 1969), 158Google Scholar.
7 Though the category of deserved punishment stands in essential contradiction to Washington's position, he gives it only scant attention. The following seems to be his only “refutation” of the alternative of deserved punishment. “Historically, the systematic victimization of the African and the American Negro has been accepted as the punishment of the will of God. But this very belief sparks the reality so opposite, the truth of hope; these victims bear the marks of those blessed of God to do his work of love …,” 176.
8 Washington, 173.
9 Washington, 173.
10 Washington, 166.
11 Washington, 158.
12 Washington, 160.
13 “Slavery was but the means for inextricably binding the Negro and the Caucasian. Without this binding the immeasurably more bruising work of releasing whites from their blasphemous bondage to whiteness and racial superiority cannot be done,” 157.
14 Coke, 121.
15 Cone, 121.
16 Cone, 59-60.
17 We have not included Cone's treatment of theodicy in Black Theology and Black Power on the assumption that his later work presents his definitive position.
18 Cone, 91. Emphasis supplied.
19 Cone, 133.
20 Cone, 131-32.
21 Cone, 247.
22 The Black Messiah (Sheed and Ward, 1969), 42–43Google Scholar.
23 Cleage, 46-47.
24 Cleage, 271.
25 Cleage, 242.
26 Cf. my forthcoming work, Is God a White Racist? Prolegomenon to Black Theology.
